FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  February 2, 2009 

Press Photos available at: http://www.retrobang.com/killerjoepress

 COMPASS THEATRE ANNOUNCES OPENING OF AWARD-WINNING PLAYWRIGHT TRACY LETTS’ KILLER JOE

 SAN DIEGO – Compass Theatre is pleased to announce the opening of Killer Joe, a black comedy by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Tracy Letts.   Killer Joe runs March 1-April 5, 2009. 

 Set in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dallas, this dark little play that won awards and rave reviews off-Broadway revolves around a dysfunctional family determined to have Mama bumped off so Worthless Son can get together some quick insurance money to pay off a drug debt.  When you need a job like that done fast and efficiently, who do you call?  A Dallas cop with a busy off-the-clock sideline that has earned him the nickname “Killer Joe.”  A fascinating event in the theater unless you work for the Dallas police or the Chamber of Commerce.  Before it’s over, nearly everyone is bloodied in this show that “revels in its white trash stereotypes and gives you permission to do the same…” (New York Daily News). 

“As I read this play for the first time and finished the final scene, I visualized the pounding silence on the stage and it was so tense I could almost hear the sizzle of bacon frying in some corner of my mind,” said Compass Theatre Founder and Executive Director Dale Morris.  “I’m so glad we found a talent like Lisa Berger to direct this play.”  

Letts is known for his ability to capture the puritan streak in his American characters.  Every one of his plays is about people struggling with moral and spiritual questions.  Born in Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts and the late actor Dennis Letts, Tracy Letts was an actor for 11 years at the Steppenwolf and Famous Door theater companies in Chicago.  He was also a founding member of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theater, which included at one time or another Greg Kotis (Tony Award, Urinetown), Michael Shannon (Academy Award Nominee, Revolutionary Road), and a host of other Chicago theater luminaries.  In 1991, he wrote his first play, Killer Joe.  Two years later, the play premiered at the Next Lab Theater in Chicago and then at 29^th Street Rep in New York.  Since then, Killer Joe has been performed in at least 15 countries in 12 languages. 

In 2008, Letts was awarded the Pultizer Prize for Drama, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and a Tony Award for his play, August: Osage County.   

Directing Killer Joe is Lisa Berger (The Long Christmas Ride Home and Looking for Normal, Diversionary Theatre).  The cast includes Judy Bauerlein, Joe Baker, Equity actor Mike Sears, Amanda Cooley Davis, and Donal Pugh.  Set design is by Michael McKeon, lighting design by Mitchel Simkovski, and costume design by Lisa Burgess.

 General Information 

Killer Joe runs March 1-April 5, 2009, with preview performances on Feb. 26-28.  Show times are Thursday through Friday at 8:00 p.m., Saturdays at 4:00 and 8:00 p.m., and Sundays at 2:00 p.m.   

Compass Theatre is located at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue in Hillcrest, in the theater formerly known as 6^th @ Penn.  Tickets for Killer Joe are $20-$23, with discounts available for groups, students, seniors, and members of the Actors Alliance of San Diego.  Preview performances are $15.   

For more information or to purchase tickets, call 619-688-9210 or visit www.CompassTheatre.com.   

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About Compass Theatre 

Compass Theatre is a 49 seat performance venue in the heart of Hillcrest and serving audiences from Oceanside to Tijuana.  Evolving from the award-winning 6^th @ Penn Theatre, Compass Theatre will offer a wide variety of programs and productions that will reach out to the edge, but always maintain a firm footing in reality based theatre.  Supported by grants from the City of San Diego, the Tippett Foundation, and the James P. Irvine Foundation, Compass Theatre obtains over 55% of its yearly income from ticket sales to individual patrons, an amazing feat considering that the city average is 45%. 

Don Braunagel

San Diego Arts

"Killer Joe" at Compass Theatre

Knocking off mom for money
By Don Braunagel
Posted on Tue, Mar 3rd, 2009
Last updated Tue, Mar 3rd, 2009

Playwright Tracy Letts creates the stage equivalents of car wrecks. You know that what you’re going to see will be at least slightly sickening, but you keep watching anyway. One of those crackups, “Killer Joe,” is now on view at Compass Theatre, and it’s eminently watchable, thanks to a crackerjack cast, superb direction and superior tech work.

Letts and his dark comedies — emphasis on the dark — are hot around the country. His recent play, “August: Osage County,” opened on Broadway in April and proceeded to a clean sweep of Big Apple best-play awards, including the Tony and the Pulitzer. Locally, “Bug,” another of his works, had a terrific staging at Cygnet in fall 2006. “Killer Joe” was his first play and incited major controversy at its 1993 debut by Chicago’s esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre. Despite that controversy — or maybe because of it — “Joe” has been regularly produced since.

It, like Letts’ others, draws from the shallow end of humanity’s pool, people who lead lives so generally desperate that they develop a skewed outlook on morality. In this case, it’s a family struggling along in a Texas trailer park. Chris, the 20-something son, is an overall failure who’s turned to drugs for fun and profit, and he’s in life-threatening trouble. Namely, he owes $6,000 to a coke dealer with a ruthless reputation.

So Chris comes to his dad, Ansel, with an idea. He has just learned that his mother, who years ago divorced Ansel and largely abandoned Chris and sister Dottie, has a $50,000 insurance policy, with Dottie as beneficiary. Chris also heard about Joe Cooper, a Dallas detective who moonlights as a hired killer, at $20,000 a pop. Thus, Chris reasons, the solution is easy: enlist Joe to kill mom, giving them $30,000 to split among the three, plus Ansel’s current wife, the randy Sharla. (In the first scene, Sharla opens the door for Chris while wearing only a T-shirt. He chides her for her semi-nakedness, but she has a ready reply: “I didn’t know who it was.”)

Chris and Ansel finally agree, but worry that Dottie, whom they shield from the world because she’s simple-minded and a hallucinating somnambulist, might not go along. No problem. She calls it a good idea because she believes her mom once tried to smother her with a pillow.

Joe shows up, fastidious and businesslike, but there’s a snag. He wants his fee — actually $25,000 — in advance. They, of course, don’t have it, so Joe decides on a retainer: the virginal Dottie. He moves in, promising to leave as soon as he’s finished his job and is paid. After a few days of such fornication, however, Chris is filled with guilt about making his sister a pawn (apparently, he’s not totally amoral) and wants to cancel the deal. But Joe, more than smitten with Dottie, refuses.

The script’s plot winds as the characters’ plot unwinds. Some twists are foreseeable, some not, but the violent ending is as inevitable as those in Greek tragedies.

Lisa Berger’s direction is riveting, and she has cast splendidly. Don Pugh, as Joe, marvelously mixes hot and cool, showing a skill that often trips up actors — making laughs sound genuine. And the others in this ensemble piece — Joe Baker as Chris, Judy Bauerlein-Mitchell as Sharla, Amanda Cooley Davis as Dottie, and Mike Sears as Ansel — are equally impressive in their range of emotions, deftness with dialect (credit coach Annie Hinton) and credibility in the physical demands (Pugh, also fight coach, has devised some realistic brawling).

An old theater maxim says you should be able to look at the set and understand the play. Michael McKean’s trailer-trash design certainly matches that qualification. Everything in the place ranges from dingy to filthy, including an apparently bullet-riddled door and piles of litter and clutter underscoring the occupants’ inattention to basic cleanliness. The whole thing has to be pretty sturdy, too, because it’s subject to considerable kicking, pounding and thrown objects.

Lisa Burgess’s costuming is Goodwill-rack exact, and Rob Hurlburt’s sound design helps with heavy thunderstorms and the low-rent tendency to play TVs and radios too loud. Mitchell Simkovsky’s lighting suffered a couple of miscues but mostly matched the moment.

Don’t bring the family. Besides the murderous theme, the abundance of gore and some nudity, there’s an explicit seduction scene and simulated fellatio. Consequently, after two acts’ worth of these characters, you may feel that “Killer Joe,” like all car wrecks, leaves you happy that you can just drive away.

REVIEW: Compass' 'Killer Joe' a harrowing but engrossing ride

By PAM KRAGEN - Staff Writer | North County Times

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 8:12 AM PDT ∞

Joe Baker (as Chris Smith) and Amanda Cooley Davis (as Dottie Smith) in Compass Theatre's "Killer Joe." (Photos courtesy of retrobang.com)

Filmmakers know how to manipulate the audience for a horror film. Keep the pacing hurtling forward, hide a surprise or twist around every corner, and create a gnawing, unsettling atmosphere of tension that puts the viewer on the edge of their seat.

Director Lisa Berger has created that horror film onstage with Compass Theatre's production of "Killer Joe," Tracy Letts' 1993 black comedy/drama about a desperate, amoral trailer trash family in 1980s Dallas. This play has it all ---- nudity, drug use, murder, bloody gore, simulated sex and raw language ---- and it's packaged in such a weirdly watchable way, you'll find it hard to look away (no matter how much you may think you want to).

Letts specializes in chronicling the seedy side of American life in a darkly comic way. His "Bug" was a disturbing look at mental illness and drug abuse in a rundown roadside motel, and his Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play "August: Osage County" profiles extreme family dysfunction in Letts' native Oklahoma.

"Killer Joe," Letts' first play, introduces us to the Smith family, a despicable bunch of losers enmeshed in a murder-for-hire scheme. Chris, a coke dealer in his mid-20s, can't pay a debt to his supplier so he and his glue-sniffing dad, Ansel, hatch a plan to hire a hit man (fastidious police detective Joe Cooper, who moonlights as a contract killer) to kill Chris' mother (Ansel's ex-wife) for her $50,000 life insurance policy.

There's just one snag. Joe wants his fee up-front, and when the Smiths can't pay, Chris agrees to give Joe a retainer ---- the deflowering and companionship of his slow-witted, sleepwalking, virgin 20-year-old sister, Dottie. Complications inevitably ensue. Chris regrets selling off his sister and plots to escape to Mexico with her, but Joe has fallen in love and will kill anyone who tries to take Dottie away from him. And Ansel's much-younger, cheating wife, Sharla, has secrets of her own that will foil the family's get-rich-quick plan. As the two-hour play careens to its bloody conclusion you know things aren't going to end well, but the train-wreck quality of its script and characters keep you hanging on for the wild ride anyway.

Berger deftly balances the play's dark humor with its uglier moments, and she has assembled a very fine cast to authentically bring these unlikable characters to life.

Don Pugh brings an edgy Dr. Phil vibe to the character of Killer Joe Cooper, a mix of false gregarity, controlling bossiness and an ever-simmering threat of violence, all delivered with an icy-cool Southern twang. Amanda Cooley Davis very smartly plays the simpleton Dottie, layering her character with elements of childlike innocence and sociopathic indifference wrapped up in a quirky unpredictability.

Joe Baker's performance as Chris reveals a character so damaged by neglect that you almost forgive him his many trespasses. Mike Sears is the play's comic relief as the dim-witted, pathetic weakling Ansel. And Judy Bauerlein-Mitchell is real and absolutely fearless as Ansel's cheap wife, Sharla.

One of the production's best features is Michael McKeon's meticulously detailed trailer interior set, which oozes filth and grime and is layered like an archeological dig with spent beer cans, old pizza boxes, trash, broken appliances and snarls of electric plugs writhing like a snake's nest out of every outlet.

Lisa Burgess' thrift store costumes are appropriately stained, disheveled and (in the case of Sharla) flirtatiously tight. Mitchell Simkovsky's lighting is as bleak as the story. Rob Hurlbut's sound design is subtle, adding an aura of dread with the barking dog, roaring thunder and eerily loud TV and radio broadcasts. Dialect coach Annie Hinton coaches uniform Texas accents from the cast. And Pugh choreographed the hyper-realistic fight scene which closes the second act.

"Killer Joe" isn't an easy play to like, but it is riveting to watch, thanks to this excellent production at Compass Theatre. Just like when you go see a horror movie, go prepared for a scary adventure and you won't be disappointed.